MIT professor Noam Chomsky may not know exactly how or why World Trade Center 7 collapsed on September 11, 2001, but the one thing he’s sure of is that there’s no federal conspiracy behind it.
Speaking at the University of Florida a few weeks ago, Chomsky – a well-known and often outspoken scholar and political commentator – was asked by “9/11 truther” Bob Tuskin if he was ready to join activists in their belief that the government played a hand in the destruction of WTC 7, also known as Building 7, and that its role was covered up by the media.
Tuskin pointed to a group of construction experts who claim Building 7 was destroyed by a controlled demolition, but Chomsky dismissed the assertion. He acknowledged that “a minuscule number of architects and engineers” agree on this issue, but said they’re not doing what scientists should do after making a new discovery.
“What you do when you think you’ve discovered something is write articles in scientific journals, give talks at the professional societies, go to the civil engineering department at MIT or Florida or wherever you are, and present your results, then proceed to try to convince the national academies, the professional society of physicists and civil engineers, the departments of the major universities, convince them that you’ve discovered something,” he said, according to Raw Story.
“There happen to be a lot of people around who spend an hour on the internet and think they know a lot physics, but it doesn’t work like that,” he added, taking a jab at conspiracy theorists. “There’s a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.”
Chomsky also said that publishing an article in an academic journal was one of the least risky things an individual could do, rejecting claims that 9/11 truthers have refrained from doing so due to fear of the government.
Building 7 collapsed several hours after the twin towers (WTC 1 and 2) did in 2001. It wasn’t struck by an airplane, but a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that the combination of structural damage by intense fires and debris from the collapse of the twin towers ultimately resulted in the building’s downfall.
Critics of this explanation believe that heat could not have caused enough damage to topple Building 7, and that explosives were placed throughout the building and detonated.
During his explanation, Chomsky also dismissed claims that the government was responsible for bringing the towers down.
“There is just overwhelming evidence that the Bush administration wasn’t involved,” he said. “Very elementary evidence. You don’t have to be a physicist to understand it. You just have to think for a minute.”
Chomsky said that even though the Bush administration clearly wanted to invade Iraq, it blamed 9/11 on Saudi hijackers. He said it could have easily blamed the attacks on Iraqi hijackers instead of presenting claims about Al- Qaeda connections to Saddam Hussein and Iraq amassing weapons of mass destruction.
Chomsky first entered the public sphere in the late 1960s with his criticism of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He has since made waves for criticizing American foreign policy and other western governments as he did the Soviet Union. He has equated interventionist policies by the U.S. with terrorism, and has called U.S. presidents “guilty of horrendous terrorist acts.” He also said that the diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks in 2010 revealed a “profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership.”